Justine Cowan Uncovers 'The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames'

Author and public interest lawyer, Justine Cowan, sits with us to discuss her memoir, The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames, in which she tells the harrowing story of her mother’s traumatic childhood raised in a London orphanage. “…I had never heard the name Dorothy Soames when I was growing up, but I didn’t really know a lot about my mother’s past or anything like that. She had always told me that she had come from some aristocratic upbringing in England and one day I found her writing this name over and over again, Dorothy Soames, and it would be years before I discovered that that was her name until she was 12 years old, growing up at the Hospital for the Maintenance and Education of Exposed and Deserted Young Children, which was also known as the Foundling Hospital, which raised illegitimate children to basically serve Britain’s ruling class.” Having been raised without love at the Founding Hospital made it difficult for her mom to be an affectionate parent and as a consequence, the mother-daughter bond between Cowan and her mother never truly formed. Growing up, she knew very little about her mother as a young child, only that she was born illegitimately, may have been cast off by an aristocratic family, and then sent off to boarding school. Later in her 30’s, Cowan received an envelope in the mail from her mom which explained details of her mother’s childhood, but because of their challenging relationship, she couldn’t read it at the time and stored the envelope away. It wasn’t until her mother’s passing that Cowan decided to journey to London to find out more about her.

Shortly after a piece about her story came out in the New York Times, Cowan started receiving various phone calls regarding her memoir. She thought her journey had ended when the book was published, but conversations from these calls helped her gather more details she felt were necessary to include. Because of this, the paperback copy of The Secret Life of Dorothy Soames contains an additional chapter with this new information. Even with the conclusion of her memoir, there were still a number of mysteries that remained, such as, where did her mom learn how to play the piano? Where did she get her upper crust accent? Many of these questions are still left unanswered.

Does Cowan think her relationship with her mother would have been different if she knew of her mom’s history and issues? “I do think it would have made a difference if I’d understood early on, but as a child, I’m not sure you really understand the concept of inter-generational trauma and all of that… Looking back, I think that my mother and what she went through was so horrific that I’m not sure if we can parse through and say, ‘well if this had happened and this had happened’ it would’ve been that significantly different, you know? Perhaps.”